David QuinnNo one should fear the truth, but the story must be looked at fully, writes David Quinn
Last summer the world got to hear about the hundreds of babies who died over a period of several decades in a mother and baby home in Tuam, Co. Galway. There was a huge outcry as reports spread that ‘800 babies were dumped in a septic tank’ on the grounds of the home (which was once a famine era workhouse).
The outcry resulted in a Government promise to set up a commission of inquiry. The terms of reference of that inquiry have now been published by Children’s Minster, James Reilly.
Before looking at the commission, however, let’s first of all consider how the story of the Tuam mother and baby home broke.
The fact that 800 babies and young children died at the home over a four decade period starting in the 1920s and ending in the 1960s was first uncovered through the diligent work of local historian, Catherine Corless.
That fact was shocking enough. But then we were told that the babies were dumped in an unmarked grave and that the grave was a disused septic tank. In addition, it was reported that the babies had not been baptised as this was allegedly ‘against Church doctrine’ because the mothers were unmarried.
When you added these various elements together, it was guaranteed that the story would go worldwide. We had cruel treatment of single mothers by the Catholic Church and Irish society at the time, a horrendous death rate, a completely inhuman means of burial, plus a doctrine that meant the unfortunate babies were buried unbaptised, and we had what often amounted to forced and therefore illegal adoptions of the babies that survived.
The impression was also given by some reports that the nuns had deliberately starved some of the babies to death.
This is probably the narrative that most people to this day have in their minds, both here and overseas, and that includes our most senior politicians.
Here is what we know to be true. Eight hundred babies did die in that mother and baby home over a 36-year period. They are buried in an unmarked (and unknown) grave.
Society and the Church were cruel to unmarried mothers. We don’t know how many babies, if any, were buried in a disused septic tank. The Catholic Church did baptise the children of unmarried mothers because there is no doctrine forbidding such a thing.
There is little or no evidence that the nuns starved any babies to death. The overwhelming majority of babies died of natural causes such as measles or gastroenteritis. This was a time when the infant mortality rate in society at large was much higher than today because poverty was more endemic, antibiotics had not been developed and there was no vaccinations.
When babies were crowded together in a confined space, once one contracted a deadly infection, it would spread very quickly to the other babies.
As a result of some of the inaccuracies in the early reporting, major international press agencies – such as the Associated Press (AP) – later issued a clarification.
A statement issued by the AP on June 20 last, said: “The Associated Press incorrectly reported that the children [in Tuam mother and babies home] had not received Roman Catholic baptisms; documents show that many children at the orphanage were baptised. The AP also incorrectly reported that Catholic teaching at the time was to deny baptism and Christian burial to the children of unwed mothers; although that may have occurred in practice at times it was not Church teaching.”
In addition it admitted: “The AP quoted a researcher who said she believed that most of the remains of children who died there were interred in a disused septic tank; the researcher has since clarified that without excavation and forensic analysis it is impossible to know how many sets of remains the tank contains, if any.”
The AP was at least honest enough to issue this clarification; many other media outlets issued no corrections at all.
We can speculate on how big an outcry there would have been if the ‘septic tank burial place’ had formed no part of the story, or if it had not been wrongly reported that the Church did not baptise the children of unmarried mothers.
However, there is no question that the mother and baby homes are worthy of investigation because an intolerably high number of babies did die in them even allowing for the time, the way some of the adoptions were carried out was unethical and probably illegal, and society and the Church were cruel towards unmarried mothers.
The commission established by the Government to investigate all this will be headed by Judge Yvonne Murphy who also conducted the inquiry into child abuse in Dublin archdiocese.
It is good that it will look into the county homes as well which is where many unmarried mothers ended up. These were run by local county councils. Were the women treated better, worse, or the same as in the mother and baby homes?
I think the commission should also be willing to look at what was happening at the same time in other jurisdictions. Far too many people believe that Ireland was uniquely bad in its treatment of unmarried mothers.
But this simply isn’t true. Britain had mother and baby homes until the 1960s and thousands of forced adoptions took place. In Sweden, single mothers were often sterilised as a direct result of the policies of the Social Democratic government of the time and were sometimes made to have abortions as well.
In Switzerland, children were removed from unmarried mothers and often effectively sold to farmers and others as labour and were frequently treated abominably.
When Martin McAleese investigated the Magdalene homes on behalf of the State he had a brief look at practice elsewhere and this showed that the Magdalene homes were neither uniquely Catholic nor uniquely Irish. This investigation should also look at what happened elsewhere.
The commission has three years to do its work. It should strive to obtain as full a picture as possible of what happened. No-one has anything to fear from the truth, but we cannot have the truth unless all elements of this story are looked at fully.